Team members in a team often collaborate remotely from dispersed geographical locations. As an example, a team working on a project may have the team members in different cities, countries, or continents. From time to time, the team lead may teleconference the team members to obtain status reports on the various tasks or items related to the project.
Different team members are often assigned different tasks, and may have different views of the same project, whereas the team lead has an overarching view of the project tasks that spans the tasks of several team members. Therefore, during a teleconference, different team members can find themselves viewing different versions of the content that is being discussed. These are some example teleconferencing cases where a problem recognized by the illustrative embodiments arises.
In contrast, a web conference allows all participants to view the same content. Generally, a presenter shares the presenter's version of the content during a discussion, and other participants view the presenter's version of the content, the presenter's movements from one topic to another topic in the presenter's content. Thus, in many cases, the web conference participants are spared the frustration of following a discussion in different versions of a given content.
However, there are cases where even the web conference participants may have to rely on their own versions—different versions—of the content being discussed. These are the example web conferencing cases where a problem recognized by the illustrative embodiments arises.
A problem recognized by the illustrative embodiments can arise in other collaboration scenarios as well. As another example, a team may comprise an observer in the field, an analyst in another location, a leader in another location, and so on. The modern battlefield is one example where such a team can be found. For example, a pilot makes observations of assets on the ground, a remote analyst observes the battlefield via a satellite view, and a commander reviews a plan document, a map, a picture, a simulation, or some combination thereof.
Generally, users dispersed in different geographical locations collaborate in a similar manner for a variety of purposes. Furthermore, different collaborating users use different devices or data processing systems for participating in the collaborative effort. Often, these different devices or data processing systems present their respective users different data about the subject of the collaboration.
The different data can be different views of the same underlying data such that a data object appears differently or in different locations in the different views. For example, one collaborating user may view the data objects in a table form, whereas another collaborating user may view the same or similar data, or a part thereof, as a grid, a map, a hierarchy, or a graphical rendering. As described earlier in the battlefield example, one user's view may be a real life view of a physical space or area and things therein from one perspective, whereas another user's view may be a representation, picture, or a virtual view thereof from the same or different perspective.
The different data can also be different versions or editions of the underlying data. For example, the underlying data or core data might reside in a repository, with one online user having live connectivity to the repository for the latest data, and another offline user having access to the older data downloaded for offline use some time ago.
As another example, one user may have a higher access privilege than another user in a team. Consequently, the user with the higher access privilege may be able to see one set of data records whereas the other user may be able to see only a subset of the set of data records.